Wednesday, 1 August 2012

Marketing Your Website

Website requirements to attract visitors
A brilliant website can disappear in a haystack of numerous other websites and remain undiscovered. The business must actively market and promote its website. The first step is to attract people to the website is to inform them of the website’s existence. At the same time the business must be able to offer something special on the website to attract people and to persuade them to visit it.

The website itself should offer:

Attractiveness: It should present something that will make people eager or curious to visit the website. Stickiness: This means that when visiting the website, the person must spend some time there and not be eager to leave. Reason to return: This means that visitors must be - how to make money fast - eager to return to the website. This can be done by making the website interesting, need satisfying, exciting, easy-to-use, personal and entertaining.

Ensuring that the website will be included in searches

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Designing and building a website is only one aspect ofbringing the business online. With billions of websites on the Internet, it is just as important that to ensure that people can find the website. Since most website traffic still comes from search engines and directories, a business should focus its initial web marketing efforts on search engine optimisation.

Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo index billions of web pages and rank them according to complex algorithms that assess the page’s accessibility, its relevance - based on specific search terms or keywords — and importance, indicated by the number of sites that link to it. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to the work that is done to a website to ensure that it gets noticed and is ranked highly by search engines. Ideally, you would want to strive for a top 10 ranking, because studies have shown that most search engine users do not scroll past the first page of results.

SEO is usually by means of the following activities:
Building a search engine-friendly website: This entails building a website using coding techniques that minimise the use of Flash (a program used for graphic
displays) and frames.

Identifying relevant keywords: Research must be done to find appropriate search terms (called ‘keywords’ or ‘keyword phrases’) that fit the target market and that will be used when searching for the website of the business.

Building the keyword into the website: Incorporating keyword-rich content into the website’s domain name, meta-tags, title tags, alt tags, headings and overall content and ensuring that content is updated regularly.

By simply adding, removing or changing a few sentences, the web designer may alter the way in which a search engine ranks its findings. For this reason, when designing or re-designing a website, the designer needs to think about the search questions that the company wants people to use when they try to find the website.

The BMI-T survey shows that 66% of local shoppers use search engines as a first attempt to find what they are looking for (see www.mbendi.com/bmi- t/about.htm; also, http://nml.ru.ac.za/carr/ marisa/current.html).

Submitting the website address (URL) to search engines: Some engines, work from home - will find and list your website on their own, some require you to register, and others offer a combination of both. Also, some registration procedures are free and some require that you pay to be listed.

Linking your website to others: Develop a reciprocal linking strategy with other websites to grow quality inbound links to the site.